Interview with Ken Tyler
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An athlete (ice hockey, lacrosse), an author, an educator, and an Olympic ice hockey coach along his journey thus far, |
You used to be a professional sports coach. Why did you decide to change the field?
Actually, it was a family decision. I did not want to risk changing cities and schools every year for the sake of coaching ice hockey. In between I was being asked more and more to give speeches and consult with business leaders. Further, in researching for the “A” licence coaching program that I was to lead in Austria, I had found a virtual university that taught coaching to those who wanted to work as a coach outside of sports. They had advertised “Every Olympic athlete has the benefit of an Olympic Coach. Why, as a top business executive, should you not have the same advantage?” Four years later I had taken every course and taught every course. All online and on telephone!
Are the patterns that were successful in sports still a recipe for success in business?
Clearly there is. This is where my social psychological principles for the performance of the individual, the individual in teams, and teams versus teams comes into play. WIthout a question, whether it be a team of humanitarians from the UN, social entrepreneurs, professional sport teams or international billion dollar conglomerates, humans act and interact as humans have always done! The basic motivations remain the same, the essential elements of teaming still require due diligence whether it be local or non-local teams. Skills vary according to culture, life experience and communication platforms and practices, but essentially, lead team habits, indeed leadership habits are absolutely the core of consistently superior performance.
What is your definition of coaching?
Coaching consists of guiding, supporting, strategizing, challenging and confronting the client and their respective teams to become aware of their inner challenges as they are being confronted by outer challenges. They can thusly pursue, with appropriate resources and vigour, those quests which will transform them for their next level of challenges. Coaching is meant to help the coachee return with the elixir, with mastery.Coaching provides for you a mirror of insights into what you know that you know, what you know that you don’t know, what you don’t know that you know, and what you don’t know that you don’t know, It does this in an “on-the-go” action oriented approach.
What’s flow and fiero?
Ahhh, you have asked me of my favorite topic for world class performance. Flow is that zone where things simply “flow”. You interact effortlessly, the communication is immediate, the support timely and without request... The trust, alignment and engagement of everyone involved in the processes being executed allows for a zone of timeless, tireless synchronicity where every stakeholder is mobilized for every challenge of each quest. They execute within a zone of full engagement, congruent alignment and smart trust. Within such a zone, there are moments of fiero moments - moments of epic triumph, which needs to be achieved frequently enough for those significant confirmations of successful performance and yet short enough lived that the space in the team’s flow zone is not lost but rather through the learning or acquisition of capabilities, can lead the team to even higher levels of trust, engagement, alignment that beget the next fiero moment and lead the team towards “world class stature”.
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